Free verse I write not at all: on principle. Unrhymed metrical verse only rarely. Almost all my poems are rhymed. For me the most difficult verseform is the form that glib or sloppy craftsmen deem easiest: unrhymed iambic pentameter. I've begun many poems in this blank-verse form but not one have I been able to finish. The exception—"A Walk on Snow"—proves the rule: except for some 1947 interpolations about art, it was written so long ago (in 1932 in high school when I was 15) that I cannot even remember what sort of person or poet I then was. Since then, no luck.

I don't mean I've given up attempting blank verse. But I've destroyed all the attempts because they all bogged down into pale reflections of the blank verse style of either the Elizabethans or Milton or Swinburne. "A Walk on Snow" I included in my Terror...